
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: TUESDAY, June 26, 1990                   TAG: 9006260215
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A-8   EDITION: METRO  
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times
DATELINE: WASHINGTON                                LENGTH: Medium

BARRY WITNESS SAYS SHE SAW MAYOR USING DRUGS

Three Virgin Islands women testified Monday that District of Columbia Mayor Marion Barry made crude sexual advances to them in a St. Thomas hotel room in which an X-rated video played on a television screen and what smelled like smoke from crack cocaine billowed from an adjacent bathroom.

Linda Creque Maynard, a mother of two, twice broke down in tears as she described how Barry forced her to have sex with him after she unsuccessfully tried to resist him.

Dixie Lee Hedrington, who said she fended Barry off, testified: "He was a pig and there was no way I would let him touch me."

Barry, who was arrested in a Washington hotel room in an FBI sting operation in January after allegedly smoking crack cocaine, is on trial in federal district court on 14 charges of perjury and use of illegal drugs.

Of the three women, only Hedrington said that she saw the mayor using drugs.

The testimony, relating to a Barry visit in March 1988, amounted to the most sweeping attack on Barry's character thus far admitted into evidence. Barry's lawyers made no serious effort to prevent the jury panel, which includes 13 women among its 18 members, from hearing the testimony. Maynard, Hedrington and a third witness, Zenna Matthias, put Barry in the vicinity of what they took to be crack cocaine and marijuana, but none of them testified to having seen Barry use drugs.

Maynard said that she was invited to Barry's hotel room by Charles Lewis, a longtime family friend and a close confidant of Barry. In Barry's room, she said, the mayor pulled her down on the hotel room bed and "was all over me."

"Mr. Barry was behind of me, leaning on me, touching on me," she said. "He was drinking his drink, and leaning on me and touching me."

She said that she was left alone with Barry, who was clad "in a robe," for at least 10 minutes. "I was fighting the mayor off. He already had me down on the bed."

"Did you and Mr. Barry have sexual relations at the hotel?" prosecutor Judith Retchin asked.

"Yes," Maynard said almost inaudibly, sobbing.

"Did you want that to happen?" Retchin asked.

Again almost inaudibly, Maynard sobbed, "No."

After she left Barry's room, she said, she found $50 in her purse and said that "it would have to have been Mr. Barry" who put it there.

Hedrington, who was unable to be present at Barry's trial because she was pregnant, was heard on a tape telling a federal grand jury that "he was a pig in my opinion." She said Lewis escorted her to Barry's room.

Hedrington, who said that she was wearing a slit dress, testified that Barry said, "He liked women with long legs and [that he] wanted to be between my legs . . . I was totally irritated with his approach . . . He went on and on, sexually, what we could do. I told him, I don't appreciate your charm."

Hedrington testified that when Lewis greeted Barry at his hotel room, he said, "I've got something for you." Lewis then showed the mayor a small pipe and "explained to him what it's for," she testified. Then they went into the bathroom, she said, and she identified the smell that wafted out from the bathroom to be that of crack cocaine.

by CNB